D.A. Levy Lives

COMICS 2 FARFALLA PRESS / MCMILLAN & PARRISH 3 OPEN 24 HOURS 4 ::the press gang:: 5 BOOG CITY X-ING BOOKS 6 A COMMUNITY NEWSPAPER FROM A GROUP OF ARTISTS AND WRITERS BASED IN AND AROUND NEW YORK CITY’S EAST VILLAGE ISSUE 53 FREE POEMS 7 Celebrate Four of the City’s Best Small Presses Inside in Their Own Words and Live

FARFALLA PRESS / MCMILLAN & PARRISH

Performances from Farfalla Press (I Feel Tractor, d.a. levy lives Anne Waldman), Open 24 Hours (Erica Kaufman), :::the press gang::: (Evan Kennedy), and X-ing Books each month celebrating a renegade press (Jeremy Schmall, Justin Taylor). Plus cheese and Tues. Nov. 25, 6:00 p.m., free crackers, and wine and other beverages. ACA Galleries New York City 529 W. 20th St., 5th Flr. (10th/11th aves) For information call 212-842-BOOG (2664) • [email protected] Small Presses Night www.welcometoboogcity.com COMICS

Advertise in BOOG CITY 82 West 3rd, two doors west of Thompson Street Sundays at 7pm. $5 donation goes to the poets

thanks 11/16 Brenda Iijima, Paul Foster Johnson, Robbie Dewhurst 11/23 Bob Hershon, Sharon Mesmer and Susie Timmons 12/7 A HUGE LUNGFULL PARTY 12/14 Maxine Chernoﬀ and Paul Hoover [email protected] 12/21 Ron Silliman and Joel Lewis

212-842-BOOG (2664) Lungfull.org/Zinc/ • Subway: ABCDEFV to West 4th Street.

music editor First printing, November 2008, 2,250 BOOG CITY Jonathan Berger copies. Additional copies of this issue may BOOG CITY [email protected] be obtained by sending a $3 ppd. check 330 W. 28th St., Suite 6H Issue 52 free poetry editor or money order payable to Boog City, to N.Y., N.Y. 10001-4754 Rodrigo Toscano the address below. Paper is copyright Boog www.welcometoboogcity.com [email protected] City, all rights revert to contributors upon T: (212) 842-BOOG (2664) politics editors publication. Boog City is published monthly. F: (212) 842-2429 editor/publisher Jen Benka, Carol Mirakove Boog always reads work for Boog City David A. Kirschenbaum [email protected] or other consideration. (Send SASE with [email protected] printed matter editor no more than five poems or pages of any letters to the editor copy editor Paolo Javier, Mark Lamoureux type of art or writing. For email subs, Joe Bates [email protected] put Boog City sub in subject line and art editor counsel then email to [email protected] or [email protected] Brenda Iijima Ian S. Wilder applicable editor.)

2 BOOGBOOG CITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM BOOG CITY 3 Artists include:

Bernadette Mayer, Reed Bye, Anne Waldman, Edmund Berrigan, Ambrose Bye, Erica Kaufman, Will Yackulic, Jeffrey Miller, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Vanessa Boff, Rob Geisen, Jack Collom, Tom Peters, Gary Parrish, LeAnn Bifoss, Akilah Oliver, Junior Burke, Christopher Ryan, Peter Lamborn Wilson (Hakim Bey), Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Anselm Berrigan, Marcella Durand, Jessica Fiorini, Jessica Rogers, Lee Ranaldo, Corrine Fitzpatrick, Stefania Iryne Marthakis, Brenda Coultas, Simon Pettet, John Coletti, Dustin Williamson, Lewis Warsh, Kristin Prevallet, Stacy Szymaszek, John High, Nathaniel A. Siegel, Arlo Quint, Chris Martin, Tyler Burba, George Schneeman, Shappy Seasholtz, Bob Holman

�� Farfalla Press currently Ready-made operates out of Brooklyn, NY and publishes works of In event of unplanned poetry, prose, anthology, wanting money digging for endless ribbons of and CD. contentment, there were toothsome Garfields www.farfallapress.blogspot.com masquerading sedated disinterest for childish regret. Available at SPD. Brother, I have seen the source and it is not pretty and it was never Marcella Durand ready-made,

Edmund Berrigan

Anne Waldman (cover art by George Schneeman)

Moon-Shaped Lute & Little Drum: A Bibliophile’s Note

Bibliophile: “accoutrement” refers to the accompaniment during “procession songs” in Vietnam

Moon-shaped lute: full sound and plucked my guts my vibration will accentuate the trance and guide the survivor’s words

Drum: after a war, walking + heart beat collage by George Schneeman full sound + beaten what skin am I? From the Bowery Broadside Reading Series what skin was I? what skin will I be? (cover art by Will Yackulic) �� 2 BOOG CITY WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM OCTOBER 2003BOOG BOOG CITY CITY 3 4 BOOGBOOG CITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM BOOG CITY 5 4 BOOG CITY WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM OCTOBER 2003BOOG BOOG CITY CITY 5 X-ING BOOKS Handmade literature. We want to make nifty things…eye-catching things…innovative things*.

JUSTIN TAYLOR More Perfect Depictions of Noise

Let’s Get Tired of Cannibalism! Is There Devil Music in Heaven?

Everyone knows salesmen After I finished the surgery—a small job The world stiffened and crumbled; figure are what’s killing us. Don’t answer I took care of myself over that’s how it started and we dug that. The the door. Listen: Every the bathroom sink with a cuticle scissors— sun did whatever; it was over too. Some- hard angle is padded with dollar signs. I thought I learned a new name for whiskey one gave us a few pills and we took those. You can tell the real thing by its reaction but when I went to write it down on exposure to the all-consuming flame. turned out it was the same name We hoped for the blurriest of all possible I wish to be unleashed upon the land and I was just excited all over again. worlds but suffered the clarity that came. in a swarm. I am the memory of a night I’m like a child sometimes—a drunk child. Darkness itself lapsed or seemed to. We there was especially bad weather were/weren’t as into it as we should have and the trains faltered and the people None of this comes close, by the way, lost heart—but, people, take heart now! to communicating what I woke been when the soundtrack cranked. We That long night is passed. The trains you up just to say. In other ways were ready for our sentences and were are back on schedule. Listen: of course it comes very, very close even filled with our own version of love The salesmen are molting. and even gets to the heart for That which asserted Its Presence— Their new shapes are impossible. of the matter and pushes through it: tiny blades curved like the bills of waterbirds, glinting wetly in light that might as well be light on water. Some desolate lake.

JEREMY SCHMALL Open Correspondence from The Senator

��

X-ING BOOKS WHERE ART MEETS LITERATURE *Where you see “things” read “books”. X-ING DESIGN TASTEFUL DESIGN OF ART CATALOGS, POSTCARDS, BOOKS, X-ETERA X-ING ART LIMITED EDITIONS OF FINE ART PRINTS AND SCULPTURE X-INGBOOKS.COM

6 BOOGBOOG CITY CITY OCTOBER 2003 WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM BOOG CITY 7 Akilah Oliver Fort Greene POETRY Excerpt from ‘The Putterer’s Notebook’ you Maxwell Heller . Chelsea .. . . Film Scenes in Search of a Genre ; ; ‘ ; ; : character A is delivering a lecture concerning ______when B enters with pouch-lipped . . , , , ,, ,, discretion.

C and D are having great fun around the ______in the ______. C falls into D’s lap, scene fades. you were not concluding a desire, backed against the wall, your upper thigh exposed next scene: the war has been underway for some time. through the riddling stockings awake but slumped, E is tied to the radiator.

as an event can simultaneously be happening and not be occurring, a F opens bathroom door in diaphanous robes, knees knocked, drops pills. very first morning awaiting a train: G. a passing across the self, & my old friend the radio, red velvet hot pants, a fashion show graduation from the Sears Charm School for girls, mix and match it seems that all is settled, but then an extreme close-up on H reveals that something is awry. I wanted a self so badly, I turned the dial to see what was on the other side, joan Mr. I embraces wife, Mr. J is forgotten. armatrading, we tried chance translations of ‘jah’ based loosely on context clues, that girl my sister, I saw her last month in l.a. at the wedding, I thought she’d be a surfer or the wife of an children laugh along the hall. Why hasn’t Mrs. K mentioned this Mr. L—who appears in a photo O.G., surprise all the time, Christian lady, you look so much younger now, as if all the blighted with oft-mentioned Ms. M—before? apartments have been repaired extreme close-up on N reveals his renewed dedication to the _____ cause what a pretty world out there character O, poorly dressed and mute, was taking dictation. now she walks along the pedestrian I am a new occupant, but this particular morning, for example, found me wandering in overpass. terrorist shadows it rains tropically on P and Q as they argue. The death dreams are often sexualized, the first, a morphing pool of consecrated limbs floundering and touching in what appeared a murky body pool R drops her legs, sits upright, covers breasts. to get to, one had to pass through a portal, not a door exactly, more like a veil, it was clouds seen from above. then S leans toward microphone and articulates: no, she does not now, duplicitous its appearance, both sensuous and repelling, quicksand like, pleasure in the going nor did she ever; no she was not, nor was it ever her intention. it is a long hypotenuse between down, the limbs indistinguishable from the souls, a man who was neither good nor evil seemed her and the others, visible at right. to be the sentry peripheral characters and T are turning the soil when a rattling car appears “a ways down the I kept telling him not to go, I couldn’t stop him from going, I tried to trick him with an road.” earth-based attachment to me to keep him from going, I had to witness him go down there with the altered bodies, there to that feast U shoulders her way through the ______demonstrators, clutching purse.

V and other picnickers sur l’herbe hear the ______blasts from across l’herbe. a recovery that exposes itself as an expectation in kitchen of W: all dishes at once. next: chair. as if to speak requires dream through fogged passenger window, we see Y approaching at a run through the downpour with hatboxes, weeping and lugging, as X (who has just arrived) looks on. cue: rear-view mirror single lines staged as tracks ornaments. we are not stating a truth Z ties the three books with twine and walks out. never to return. a truth would require more negotiation than water rights character A waits in soup line. an expectation relegates mystery to a rack (repeat) Holly Melgard it may be true that he was saying “dismissal” Buffalo it may be true we expected more, then gradually less Excerpt from “Retrospective To Do’s” as if a dream expires #423.687: Slurp up the sea in its entirety. 6/10/10 #423.686: Implement a physical-body pile. #423.685: Regulate newness and the expression of newness. #423.684: Hang your hat on a glimpse of palpable elasticity. #423.683: Calculate the geometry of interrelations and de-calculate the metrics of outer-relations at the same time. #423.682: Process information according to a reduction of organic references. #423.681: Extract emotionally dyslexic samples from the space-and-time pile. #423.68: Rotate in megaphors periodically. About the Poets #423.679: Modify further clauses in the modification pile. Maxwell Heller is the fine arts and poetry editor for George Braziller #423.678: Reorganize the You’s and I’s as sideways in the influx of either. Publishers. His reviews and essays appear regularly in The Brooklyn Rail, #423.677: Design a set of icons that spell out nearness as it passes. where he is a contributing writer. Holly Melgard has served as the editor #423.676: File them under the inconsequential strokes of our social calligraphy. of the literary journals Slightly West and Converse. She is a recent graduate #423.675: Ventriloquize a sound system of radical and or fluctuating textures. of The Evergreen State College and resides in Buffalo, where she is working #423.674: Pronounce the new language designated for the new experience. on her Ph.D. in English. Akilah Oliver writes and thinks about little things. Her #423.673: Separate out the gestures symptomatic of linear activity. books include a(A)ugust, The Putterer’s Notebook, “the she said dialogues: #423.672: Pickle them in the waters of the unreality-bog. flesh memory”, and coming soon, “A Toast in the House of Friends.” #423.671: Express hostility toward the furthest bounding boxes of virtual and actual shapes. #423.67: Exacerbate the will-do, what-now, and the you-know fonts. #423.669: Designate peripheralism as the new inactivism, but first, inactivism as the new activism, and before that, activism as the new horizontal expanse. #423.668: Reverse the expanse recall. #423.667: Collapse into the soft spectrum imploding.

6 BOOG CITY WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM WWW.WELCOMETOBOOGCITY.COM OCTOBER 2003BOOG BOOG CITY CITY 7 Bowery Books is proud to announce the release of BODY OF WATER by Janet Hamill

Poetry by Janet Hamill Photographs by Patti Smtih

Praise for Body of Water

“...This book is a romantic, surreal, lyrical Voyage. It twists and turns with the playful tide of poetic vi- sion, enhanced by the delicate measures of Patti Smith’s photography. Kudos all around.”

--Anne Waldman

“Reading Janet Hamill now, as I have over the last thirty years, I’m amazed again at the particulars of the world her poetry makes – a night world, as I read it, peopled with bright creatures & splashes of color, beautiful & terrifying by turns.... With this & much more, she has become indispensable.”

--Jerome Rothenberg

Bowery Books gratefully acknowledges that this publication is made possible with public funds from The New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Bowery Books is a proud member of CLMP.

For informaiton on how to purchase the book go to: www.boweryartsandscience.org